Dark New World (Book 2): EMP Exodus (26 page)

“But you’re almost out, Mom,” Cassy said, her irritation rising.

Mandy flinched at the harsh tone. “Calm down, sweetie. You know that the Lord will provide, if it’s meant to happen. Either we’ll find more, or I’ll go to be with my husband, and that’s a fine thing, too.”

Cassy flashed at her mother. “Not yet it’s not. Jesus, Mom, you can’t get this low without telling me!”

Mandy pursed her lips. “Do
not
speak like that in front of me. Show respect for Lord, or at least for me. You aren’t too old for me to yell at you in front of everyone. Anyway, I raised you better than that.”

Cassy took a deep breath and let it out. “I know, Mom. I’m sorry, and I know the Lord loves us. I just… You scare me when you get low on your insulin. For crying out loud, this place is overflowing with fruits and vegetables, and grains too.
Why
do you keep eating so much meat and bread, and putting so much honey in your tea, and—”

Mandy held up her hand, palm toward Cassy, and brought the interruption to a halt. “I’m an old woman, sweetie. I don’t have your father anymore, so I take comfort where I can. If comfort is a bad diet, I’m okay with that. Why not? When I’m done here on earth, I’ll be with him again. All the rest is fuss and feathers and barking at nothing. Dying holds no fear for me, sweetie.”

“Fine, I know you don’t care. You say so often enough. But Aidan and Brianna care, and I care, and the whole Clan cares because without your help organizing things we’d lose precious time. We need all the time we can get to be ready for winter. We need you not to leave us just now.” By now Cassy’s eyes had taken on a mischievous sparkle. She added, “But I guess you can thank God, because I thought to stockpile a bunch of it here, down in the bunker.”

Mandy’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Perhaps He gave you that idea, Cassy. And just how, sweetie, did you get your hands on ‘a bunch of insulin’? Do you have a prescription? Why didn’t you tell me you have diabetes?”

Cassy smiled. “No, Mom, I’m fine. You don’t need a prescription when you know people who can get on the Dark Web.”

Mandy looked up with one eyebrow raised, and the confused look on her face made Cassy smile. “It’s like a hidden internet that you get on with a special browser and a VPN…” Her mother looked even more blank so Cassy brought it back down a level. “Anyway, you could get just about anything needed before it all fell apart. That’s where I got my stockpile of medicines. Antibiotics, insulin, and so on. I have months of insulin for you, because I bought enough for the neighbors when I thought the end of the world would be due to the dollar collapsing. We’re well stocked now, even in this nightmare where everyone is starving to death. We have more than you need, for quite a while.”

Cassy put on a happy face, but inside she seethed in frustration. The insulin wouldn’t last forever despite what she told her mom, and if she couldn’t get her mom to eat a more diabetic-friendly diet, it was just a matter of time until Grandma Mandy would be gone. She wished she could make that frustrating old lady eat right, but no one could force Mandy to do anything. A stubborn, strong old lady. It was probably where Cassy got it, come to think of it.

“Love you, Mom. Think about eating some kale, okay?” But she knew Mandy would do no such thing. Sighing, she made a mental note to put insulin on the scrounger’s A-List of items to look for.

* * *

Taggart looked up at the hot afternoon sky and wished it were cooler. But then again, winter would come all too soon, if they lived that long. He’d take summer discomfort over winter’s whole different set of more lethal challenges. He didn’t know how he’d keep his men alive. Well, one obstacle would be the same: Mr. Black and his goons, as always, were threatening to get out of control. Self-control, reasoning, and thinking beyond the next impulse? Not their strong suit. At least the Militia folks and Taggart’s own soldiers were towing Taggart’s line. The soldiers did already, and all it had taken to get the Militia forces under his chain of command was to tell them they were now in the regular military under the declaration of Martial Law, and the future depended on them. You could see them stand straighter when they heard that. No, they were almost all completely with the program now.

Some had resisted, of course. Barracks lawyer types claimed they were under State authority via the Posse Comitatus regs, until Taggart pointed out there was no State-level chain of command and they were superseded by the Enforcement Acts in the mid-’50s. In occupied territory, military regs for troops applied.

But what really brought them in was peer pressure by the other Militia troops. They hadn’t been disorderly since. Taggart was happy, for once, to have received all that training about such issues in NCO school. He’d hated it at the time—useless civilian garbage—but it came in handy now…

Eagan stood beside him in silence for a while, but then broke into his thought. “Hey Cap, how come those gangbanger assholes get to do what they want? I mean, you’re in charge of them too, right?”

Taggart grimaced. “It seems the gangbangers who follow Mr. Black don’t want to obey the rules of Martial Law. Our problem with them is, Mr. Black takes every opportunity to undermine military authority. He told his ‘bangers he was pissed at the Militia for ‘betraying his trust.’ Black’s connections brought the Militia in, after all, so I can understand why he was pissed. Command Chain issues are
always
a pain in the ass, Eagan. Remember that if you ever shape up enough to hit NCO.”

Taggart ignored Eagan’s insubordinate chuckle, of course—this was just how they interacted in private. Eagan was a good soldier most of the time, and could be counted on when it all hit the fan at once. He’d seen that when the ‘vaders took out the rest of his troops. But Eagan had a point; sooner or later Black needed his comeuppance. Under the terms of Martial Law, he had potentially become treasonous, to say nothing of Black’s role in getting Taggart’s poor kid brother killed, long ago. Taggart smiled at the thought of applying comeuppance personally. But not before he tried it out on Chongo first. Now
there
was a case of treason no one would dispute.

Taggart continued, “Eagan, for now I have to go along to get along, because we need Black’s forces, and his contacts. His resources have kept us alive. And he’s been careful to keep his contact with the 20s a secret despite our best efforts to figure it out. We need his intel even more than we do his irregulars.” He shook his head. “When the kitchen’s on fire, you smile at the firemen dumping buckets of water on you.” Frustration on top of more frustration… The day Black died would be a very good day. He sighed. “Our guys are more combat-effective with than without him, whether we like it or not. And safer, too, with Black’s forces to lean on.”

Eagan smirked. “I’m a shitbird, you always say, but
that guy
is just a beotch. I mean, a beotch, sir! So, um, when the time comes, can I shoot him?”

Taggart couldn’t quite hold his smile off his face and the kid saw it. He was getting to be almost like Taggart’s lost brother. No, maybe more like a nephew. An irritating, pain-in-the-ass nephew you couldn’t help rooting for. And face it, a damn good man to have at your side when bullets started to fly.

“Aw, shut up, Eagan,” Taggart growled, dropping back into his customary gruff sergeant role. “Do some pushups, run around the block. Something not here. And don’t worry, kid. The cosmos, or God, or Vishnu, or Spongebob Squarepants will deal with Black someday. It’s the nature of things. Let’s just hope we’re there to see it.”

It didn’t seem likely. Before anything else, tomorrow’s raid had to succeed, with Chongo sniping from the sidelines and Black undermining every decision he made. He and the kid faced an impossible task. Well, they’d just have to take it a step at a time, and then another, and another, and not get killed.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” he muttered to himself and reached for another shot of the good stuff.

- 3 -

0900 HOURS - ZERO DAY +19

CHIHUN GHIM’S FOOT caught on a rock and he fell to his knees. Grunting from the pain, he sat and examined his legs. His khaki pants had a new hole over the left knee, and he saw that a bit of blood seeped into the torn fabric. Flexing his leg, however, he didn’t feel too much pain. Nothing more serious than a scraped knee.

That was a relief, though there was still danger of infection like the one setting into the recent cut on his face. He’d received that a few days prior, just outside of Harrisburg, escaping another armed patrol of invaders. He could have killed the Arabic soldier who had found him, but that would go against everything he believed in. The result of that decision was a very close call with death, hours of running and hiding, and a bloody gash over his right cheekbone running all the way down to his chin. Yet, he’d found a way to live up to the precepts of his philosophy even in the face of an enemy who wanted to kill him.

As he sat clutching his skinned knee, he almost wished he’d decided to head north instead of south from College Township—home of Penn State, where he was a senior—but no, the foreign invaders were thicker to the north, everyone said, so he had taken the safer direction. “Not much safer,” he muttered, considering how most of the people he’d met along the way wanted to kill him, thinking him one of the enemy.

Chihun had a vague idea of heading toward Scranton, where his parents had lived and where he might have some family left, but every time he tried to head north he ran into patrols, or hostile people. He’d been steadily herded south-easterly.

“Life is pain, but that pain comes only from holding on. Let Scranton go, and follow where life takes you, Choony,” he told himself.
 

Once the pain in his knee subsided, he adjusted his wire-rim glasses and crossed his legs, then tried to clear his mind. Perhaps meditating would grant him some enlightenment about where to go next. His parents would have said so, but Chihun wasn’t so certain. Still, meditating always made him feel better and focus his thoughts.

“I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha,” he began, but then a shot rang out to his east, and he threw himself flat. The gunshot was chased by dozens more.

Chihun calmed himself and simply observed. Okay, there were a few different weapons being fired, because the shots sounded different. And he couldn’t be certain, but he thought whoever had been shot at was firing back. He frowned; that meant raiders, or invaders. But at least this time there was return fire. Most of the gunfights he’d heard since leaving Penn State had been clearly one-sided.

The sporadic gunfire continued, and with each report his heart ached. People were likely dying right now, all because some people wanted more than they had. Because some had more than others, death would come for some. And such was the case all over America, he realized. What other reason could there be for the invasion?

Chihun came to a realization, and it struck him with almost a physical sensation; he must go, and see of what use he could be should anyone survive the attack. What else was his purpose for having wandered to
this
spot at
this
time, if not to aid his fellow victims? Perhaps only to bury them, though he hoped not.

“You asked for clarity of purpose, Choony. Do not turn away from the sign you’ve been given.” He stood and then crept forward, careful to stay in cover as much as possible, heading toward the sounds of violence. It took only a couple of minutes to find the source.

As he crested a low hill covered in trees and bushes, he saw below him the terrible scene. A dozen men and women were scattered in a semi-circle around the southern side of a pair of houses. They all wore some sort of red clothing or headbands, bandanas or scarves, and were shooting at the occupants hidden within the houses; one house looked finished, and the other was under construction, with no roof as of yet.

Chihun was struck by the fact of the attackers’ bits of red clothing. For a moment he was lost in the memory of his parents describing the chaos of the war in their homeland, the civil war that had cost them most of their family, and which had made them flee to America for safety back in the early ‘50s, after the Americans pushed the flood of Chinese back across the border. His parents had described the terrible cruelty and torments brought upon their village by red-clad communist warriors, Chinese and Korean alike.

From inside those buildings came a flurry of return fire, bringing Chihun back to the moment. One of the red-clad attackers fell screaming, and the two nearest him fled southward. A shot rang out from the property, but it didn’t come from the houses. He glanced around and saw that there was a makeshift tower, like a guard tower, and Chihun marveled that he hadn’t seen it before. He’d just been so focused on the people in red.

The thought struck him that anyone in that tower that saw him would likely shoot at him at the moment. He threw himself to the ground ungracefully and hoped he had not been seen by the tower’s defenders.

Below him, the fight was petering out. Another of the red attackers fell, this time without so much as a scream, and another fled. Seeing that, the other reds began to fall back, at first in an orderly way but as another fell to a defender’s bullet the rest fled in earnest. In moments, the fight was over.

Now Chihun considered a different problem. If the tower defenders had not seen him yet, they would see him if he tried to escape the area right now. Moreover, he decided, the red fighters had scattered and would likely stumble across him, or he across them, if he ran without a purpose in mind. For the time being, he was stuck. “Okay, Choony,” he muttered, “just stay put a few hours, and then make your escape. The red bandits will be gone by then and the tower people won’t be on alert. Maybe you can get away unseen.”